Spatial visualisation

Jan-Philipp Kolb

Tue Sep 08 20:58:58 2015

Hello world

Fra Mauro Map

Drawing maps has a long history
Fra Mauro map (1450) is the greatest memorial of medieval cartography
Source: Wikipedia

Migrant route to Germany

Used at BBC - get an overview of more maps like this here

The road to Europe

Source: The Independent

Data on the conflict in Syria - UNHCR
Analysis on Syrian Refugee Settlement Clinic Locations with R

Motivation

GDP per capita

Data source: World Development Indicators

GDP in German federal states

Map produced with R-package sp
Data source: Wikipedia
Polygon source: Global Administrative Areas (GADM)

More detailed - more interesting?

Social index - Proportion of social benefits recipients in Berlin

Source: Tagesspiegel

Is the necessary data available?

Source

The spatial perspective…

… is relevant to get an overview of current developments
… is relevant to understand circumstances.

But how to get the adequate data?

Necessary data is often not available
More spatial visualisations are possible with web-data via Application Programming Interface (API)

A little quiz - which town is it?

Background info

Map of photographic/traffic activity
Data from flickr used
Guess about picture taker’s mode of transportation
Time stamps and distance traveled between a user’s pictures
- Black is walking (less than 7mph),
- Red is bicycling or equivalent speed (less than 19mph),
- Blue is motor vehicles on normal roads (less than 43mph);
- Green is freeways or rapid transit.

New York

Source: Eric Fischer

Two ideas combined

Map Of Touristiness
Tracking Taxis Across Manhattan
The geotaggers world atlas

World Map Of Touristiness

Source: Touristiness

Based on tourist pictures uploaded on panoramio

Locals and Tourists

Blue points on the map are pictures taken by locals (people who have taken pictures in this city dated over a range of a month or more).
Red points are pictures taken by tourists (people who seem to be a local of a different city and who took pictures in this city for less than a month).
Yellow points are pictures where it can’t be determined whether or not the photographer was a tourist (because they haven’t taken pictures anywhere for over a month).

Tourists and Locals

Tracking Taxis Across Manhattan

Source: The New York Times

Target / Motivation

The target is to visualize social aspects in maps.

$pic$

More examples

Spatial? - Motivation

Massive amounts of data … and growing!
Often freely accessible on the web (e.g. through APIs)
Often unstructured or semi-structured (e.g. web documents, news archives), often heterogeneous
Often not intended for geographic purposes, but implicitly containing geographic info implicitly (Web 2.0)
Often with little or no metadata

Examples

Organisation

Targets

I want to….

… show you examples of useful and less useful visualisations and applications.
… talk about the developments of maps/geography.
… clarify, why it is important for social sciences.
… show you how to produce your own maps/visualisations.
… tell you where you can find data.

Source

Learning by doing

Source

Targets

Every participant should present his/her own maps.

Presentation of toolbox (R, Google API, OpenStreetMap etc.)
Learning by doing is very important

Background

Personal information

University of Trier

Source: Website with city maps

Erasmus - Univerity Lyon III

Source: orangesmile

Source: Urban day

  link1 <- paste(graph.path,"MannheimMap.jpg",sep="")
# http://www.heimatundwelt.de/kartenansicht.xtp?artId=978-3-14-100260-7&stichwort=Quadrate&fs=1

Gesis Mannheim

  link1 <- paste(graph.path,"GESISMannheim.png",sep="")

Organisation Gesis

Five departments - Survey Design and Methodology

Monitoring Society and Social Change
Data Archive for the Social Sciences
Computational Social Science
Knowledge Technologies for the Social Sciences

Gesis

GESIS is:

Infrastructure Services for social sciences
over 250 employees at three sites (Mannheim, Cologne)

GESIS offers:

Consulting for research projects in all phases
Research based services

Tasks GESIS-Team Statistics:

Consulting and research on …

Planning of survey designs
Development of sample designs for face-to-face, written, and telephone-assisted surveys
Data analysis and visualisation

Your background?

Where do you come from?
What are you studying?
What are your research interests?
Which map would be interesting for you?

Tools for this course

Tools and services

R programming language

R is a programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. The R language is widely used among statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis. Polls, surveys of data miners, and studies of scholarly literature databases show that R’s popularity has increased substantially in recent years.

Source: Wikipedia

Google maps

Google Maps is a desktop web mapping service developed by Google. It offers satellite imagery, street maps, 360° panoramic views of streets (Street View), real-time traffic conditions (Google Traffic), and route planning for traveling by foot, car, bicycle (in beta), or public transportation. Google Maps offers an API that allows maps to be embedded on third-party websites, and offers a locator for urban businesses and other organizations in numerous countries around the world.

Source: Wikipedia

Open Street Map

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world. Two major driving forces behind the establishment and growth of OSM have been restrictions on use or availability of map information across much of the world and the advent of inexpensive portable satellite navigation devices.

Source: Wikipedia

Github

GitHub is a Web-based Git repository hosting service, which offers all of the distributed revision control and source code management (SCM) functionality of Git as well as adding its own features. […] GitHub provides a Web-based graphical interface and desktop as well as mobile integration. It also provides access control and several collaboration features such as bug tracking, feature requests, task management, and wikis for every project.

Source: Wikipedia

Why use R

Why use R - It’s open source

It’s free
It’s open source
…

R is the leading tool for statistics, data analysis, and machine learning. It is more than a statistical package; its a programming language, so you can create your own objects, functions, and packages.

Source: http://www.r-bloggers.com/why-use-r/